Lights! Camera! Interaction! Design Inspiration from Filmmaking

Storytelling is a core component in designing for meaningful, engaging experiences but its usefulness goes beyond helping communicate the goals and benefits of your product or design to stakeholders, team members and users. With a strong understanding of storytelling we can make better decisions about functionality, appearance, UI, tone and more, to evoke the experiences we want to create for our users.

Filmmaking, a storytelling medium, follows a similar process, beginning with a screenplay and then deriving from it a series of decisions like appearance, action, composition, etc. all of which are made to influence the audience’s experience. To do this, filmmakers have developed and long made use of tools and techniques that aid in communicating with audiences to better evoke ideas, emotions, and even behaviors.

Some of these tools, like storyboards and parallax animation, have already found their way into our processes and designs. But a closer examination of these tools reveals possibilities to expand upon them and strengthen their impact. And a deeper exploration of filmmaking itself reveals numerous additional techniques that are not often discussed in interactive design, but hold potential for adaptation and can serve to challenge and inspire designers.

In this talk we’ll examine:

Tools that help their crews collaborate and coordinate around a film’s vision

Cinematic patterns used to convey information to an audience non-verbally

The linear qualities of storytelling and how they apply to experience design

Methods for directing viewer’s attention and guiding the viewer’s experience